Table of Contents

Recommended routers

Introduction

Really specific per scenario but these are generic recommendations based upon what's considered “reasonable” in terms of reliability and performance. Please note that the OpenWrt project itself does not endorse any hardware or manufacturer unless there's a public statement, this is solely a list put together by the community. General recommendations are at least 8Mbyte of flash and 64Mbyte of RAM, 16Mbyte of flash and 128Mbyte of RAM or more doesn't hurt however. Platforms that have less than 8Mbyte of flash will have noticeable space constraints, this can be remedied by using extroot (external storage) to some extent. Having less than 64Mbyte of RAM also imposes limitations, basic network functionality may work however there are reports of memory errors while using opkg and luci among other services which may operate unreliable or in worst case freeze the system. You can work around this somewhat by using a swap device but it's not entirely a substitute for actual RAM. It's much slower and requires external storage which may lead to system instability if you overload (use too much memory) your device and not suitable for using flash drives due to limited writes in total.

This page was solely created because people kept asking this question each and every day on #openwrt @ Freenode.

Please also read the wiki page for the specific device as there may be information not mentioned here that may be of value.

Platforms

(Qualcomm) Atheros ar71xx

This platform has been supported for years and have a proven to be a mature one including wifi.
Major downside is that it's a family of single core SoCs and their age are starting to show in terms of performance and also compared to what's available in the same price range.

AR9331 series uses a cheaper SoC (MIPS 24Kc) and lower clockrates which results in lower performance but also less power consumption making it a popular choice in small designs or development boards.
<Please provide generic numbers here>

AR934X are preferred due to their performance (MIPS 74Kc), usually shipped with ath9k (11n) compatible radios and if any USB 2.0-port(s).
Generic throughput numbers are about 150-230mbit/s (LAN-WAN without PPPoE) and ~15mbyte/s using the USB interface. Applying QoS cuts throughput in half or more depending on used algorithms. These devices are in general being phased out in favor for the newer QCA95XX-series.

QCA95XX are the latest family of MIPS based SoCs by QCA and provide a slight boost in performance (~10-15%) compared to the AR934*-series because of the higher clock frequency. These systems are usually shipped with ath10k radios which supports 11ac however these drivers need to rely more on the firmware blob which makes improving the driver hard. Wifi performance peaks at about 400mbit depending on conditions.

Mediatek MT7621(A/AT)

A quite well supported platform, it has 2 cores and 2 threads (somewhat similar to Hyperthreading on x86) along with a more powerful core (MIPS 1004Kc) which makes this SoC about about twice as fast as the AR934X-series (depending on application). These are typically shipped with 11ac hardware and the driver (mt76) works fairly well, it's still under development but is more open than the ath10k driver making it a more interesting choice for the Open Source community. Generic throughput numbers are about 400-500mbit/s (LAN-WAN without PPPoE) and ~45mbyte/s using the USB3 interface. It's also worth noting that products using this SoC are usually cheaper or priced about the same as the Atheros 11n and 11ac counterparts but might be hard to come by.

As of writing there's no workingVLAN support in the switch for this SoC.

Why isn't my device/platform listed?

There may be several reasons, here's a few:

Unavailable

Not supported

Requires serial access (may not be an issue for some) for flashing and/or recovery.

Unstable

Marvell Armada 385 aka 88F6820

This is a relatively new platform based on ARM compared to the other ones here that are MIPS based. It offers the best performance but is also in general the most expensive one. It offers 2 cores running at 1.6Ghz and does linespeed NAT. It's usually coupled with wifi using the mwlwifi driver which is considered unstable for now and may crash the system occationally. Wired performance and stability is good(?), USB (status?), SATA (status?) however. As of writing there are no known user friendly products available that OpenWrt supports, serial access is needed for recovery and stability isn't (yet) up the standard of the other platforms.

MediaTek MT7620A

A quite common “value” SoC that's aim for the same market as the Atheros AR9311 SoC. Slightly higher clock speed making it a bit faster while still having low power consumption. Wired performance is stable including partial VLAN support (up to VLAN ID 15?) however some are reported stability issues with 2.4G (rt2800-pci) and 5G radio may not work depending on chipset. MT7610E lacks a driver (please confirm) although some also ship with MT7612E which is supported by the mt76 driver.

OpenWrt is a community project and works a lot of platforms, these are just a few ones that are “easy” to get working. There are a lot of other products/boards that OpenWrt runs on so be sure to check out the Table of Hardware for more supported hardware.

This page isn't obviously for the hardcore user, if you were you wouldn't be here.